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![Left Out: When the Truth Doesn't Fit In by [Tara Reade]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/4131nEiQo6L._SY346_.jpg)
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Warrior Mother Tar-icca von Munchausen strikes again, and it's just...so...bad.
Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2020
No. Sorry, but no.Full disclosure: I’ll be writing from the perspective of someone who has a lot of background on Tara Reade and her decades-long story of a life filled with sorrow, dysfunction, and maladaptive coping/behavior. And if you’re here about this book, you likely came from one of two camps: Rose Twitter (socialists who support Tara Reade) or Trumpanzees (Trump fans who support Tara Reade). It’s an unbelievable convergence of two supposedly polar opposites on the issue of sexual assault, however transparent their own political purposes; but if anyone could prove Horseshoe Theory correct, it’d be the great and mediocre equine enthusiast, Tara Reade.But before I get to the content, there’s one thing of note (stylistically) off the bat: Reade’s vanity press publisher, “TVGuestpert Publishing” (whose founder Jacquie Jordan was punk’d by Sacha Baron Cohen in ‘09) placed their name on the bottom of every page, with two pages of ads for more of their well-reviewed motivational books that you’ve never heard of in the back of the memoir. TVGuestpert’s quite unabashedly intrusive about what they do, printing this promo schlock on the copyrights page: “Our full-service production company, publishing house, management, and media development firm promises to engage you creatively and honor you and ourselves, as well as the community, in order to bring about fulfillment and abundance both personally and professionally.” It’s a perfect union actually, as neither Reade nor TVGuestpert can help their self-promotion at any cost. For TVGuestpert, however, this would be a losing investment in terms of narrative, structure, and format.It’s short--a mere 170 pages in the .pdf version released on October 27th--and is a quick read at a fairly consistent fifth grade reading level. The first chapter,“Tara-rized: Scandal in a Pandemic”, will set the tone for the sudden transitions within her embarrassingly Hackneyed & Cringe narrative complete with friendly forest creatures and wild rom-com sequences: her weak attempts at segues make for rough transitions and it gives the reader a feel that everything is completely disjointed and sometimes nonsensical; I found myself asking, “Wait, where did that person pop up from?” or “Wait, I thought she said something else two pages back?” Indeed, on page 154 she states that “In 1999, Ted’s parental rights were terminated in court due to abuse of his daughter,” while on the very next page she writes, “That year was a rollercoaster of events that led to me getting full custody and Ted’s parental rights being terminated in 1998.” It’s almost as if she just sat down and wrote it in a day without spell checking and submitted it to TVGuestpert where they too failed to edit anything apart from placing their ads everywhere.Allow me to zip through a few incidentals regarding content: Reade and her supporters made a big stink--and big false allegations--on Twitter about her daughter’s Michaela privacy, yet it’s the first name she mentions in the book in the dedication despite the “(some) names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals” disclaimer. Rose McGowan’s foreword is her usual pompous celebrity claptrap that kicks off the libel against our 47th vice president, and Reade’s introduction is, like all other things that came before it in her life, full of lies.But there is one lie in particular that stood out to me when I read it: it was the claim that her then-ex-husband (their divorce was final in November 1996) raped her on Easter Sunday 1997:“It was Easter Sunday, and he came to see Michaela and I at our new place. It would be the last time we would interact without legal restrictions. He played with Michaela and her Easter basket briefly, then she went down for a nap. I stood awkwardly wishing that he would just leave, but then he said, “ Let’s go lie down. I need to lay down now.” What happened next I have not spoken about publicly and rarely privately. Does lightning strike twice? In my case, yes.” (pg. 152)Actually, no. No, it doesn’t.(This is extraneous to an actual book review, but it’s all important to note, regarding the veracity of her claims within. There are two things that this memoir should be fact checked against, her accusations compared: available court documents from her 1996 divorce & 1997 visitation dispute from her allegedly violent ex-husband Theodore “Ted” Dronen and her essay on The Women’s International Perspective’s website called “ Defying the Rule of Thumb: A Domestic Violence Survivor’s Story” (published February 13, 2009). Both are easily discoverable online, and I discovered them months ago. I've provided a screencap of the relevant page of Reade's 1997 sworn court statement concerning Easter Sunday 1997.)Ted wrote in his sworn statement to the court that he and Reade had a reconciliation from November 1996 until April 2nd, 1997. Ted also wrote in the same statement that during that reconciliation, Reade would allow him to see Michaela unsupervised several times (even though that wasn’t part of the court’s orders) and that Reade would stalk him, pleading with him some sob story about how she didn’t like how her life was going (Ted had *over*paid his child support payments for at least five months because of a large check from his grandfather, but then told Reade that he wasn’t going to be able to offer that extra money anymore after April). However, once Ted ended the reconciliation on April 2nd, Reade did everything she could to obstruct Ted’s rightfully earned court ordered visitation including going to his probation officer.This book certainly filled in that blank for me, since it’d been muddied as to what happened on that Easter Sunday according to the court documents. But I feel that potential readers need to know what was said in 1997 about that date and the days that came, according to both Reade and her ex. Because of Reade’s false implications, Ted’s probation officer had issued a warrant for his arrest but then dropped it after conferring with Ted’s counselor. Yes, Reade had contacted *both* Ted’s probation officer and his counselor, and this is what Ted had to say about the latter:“(Reade) asked him to confirm that I was a member of his group. (Reade) requested that (my counselor) discuss matters regarding my attendance in group therapy, and asked him to agree with her opinion that something must be wrong with me.”That happened on April 8, 1997, nearly a week after Ted ended their reconciliation. Literally no one was buying what Reade was selling--not even Reade herself, apparently, because this is what she swore to the court on June 11, 1997 about that same day (see accompanying screenshot):“There was no reconciliation until the weekend of March 30, 1997. Mr. Dronen and I did havecordial relations and discussions regarding reconciliation over the period of 6 months.”Then later on she wrote:“The petitioner ended any possibility of reconciliation with his verbal abuse on March 30th infront of our daughter and taking her to his residence without my permission and at my protest.”There was absolutely nothing in the court statement that reflects the current fantasy that’s described in this book; in the book, her ex doesn’t just verbally abuse her and take off with his child. No, the *new* narrative is that quiet Ted was charming and threatening, raping her practically at knifepoint, left her bleeding, and doesn’t take the child. For someone who was desperate to spin the consensuality of their reconciliation and to keep Ted away from his daughter if he wasn’t willing to continue a reconciliation, she couldn’t spin it into rape even to her ex’s probation officer.And her supporters still wonder why no one believes her stories? Really? Incidentally, the judge ruled in favor of Ted’s unsupervised visitation, and that’s why Reade flipped out and ran off with Michaela, hiding her from him and his family; she makes reference to this in the book, when “one night Ted’s relatives were pounding on [her mother Jeanette’s] door, yelling and asking for Michaela and me” (pg.140). This big new accusation is nothing but another big lie in the neverending chain of lies Reade has told in order to cope with a fractured identity from a broken and dysfunctional household where everyone lies.I think next to the new accusation of rape, the badly segued passages straight out of Roman Holiday irritated me the most, as it read with a suffered mangling of the beautiful (and unitalicized) Italian language: “Adiamo” & “Adaiamo” (andiamo) “docdici” (dodici) “pourvo bambina” (povera bambina). Further bad editing (“countere”, end quotes as beginning quotes, awkward sentence structure), “Stacey” for “Stephanie’ in identical copypasta from the “Defying the Rule of Thumb” essay just fortifies the fact that this was a hastily, sloppily put together self-publish that deserves nothing but scorn.But ah, of course, readers wanted to know if there was anything new about the Biden accusation. Of course there was. She’s gone from saying that “There was no like exchange, really,” to podcaster Katie Halper in March 2020 to her having an exchange, saying “Yes, Senator?” (pg. 114). She’s gone from saying “he grabbed me by the shoulders and he said, “ You’re okay, you’re fine, you’re okay, you’re fine.” And then, uhm, he walked away and he went on with his day” to Halper (and to Megyn Kelly in May 2020) to this in the book:“Then abruptly he said, “Go on now, you’re fine. You are okay.”Instead, I was frozen in place. He lightly shook my shoulders...I am trying to get my one shoe back on after being on my tiptoes when he was holding me at the wall.The Senator adjusted his shirt and pants, and strode away with his gym bag. He did not look back. I heard someone shout, “Joe,” but I could not see anyone. He was jovial in his response. And with that, Joe Biden was gone. (pg. 115)It’s common that trauma victims will remember and add details of their traumatic experience later, but the kind of *strong* trauma details that stick with you throughout--like the “smell of dry cleaning” Reade describes to [the sexist clown of a supporter] Anthony Zenkus on page 28 weren’t present in either long recollection she gave to either Harper or Kelly. Scent is a primary trigger for trauma since there’s little control over what the nose knows (one can’t “shut their nose” quickly enough like one can shut their eyes); the trigger of scent encodes differently and the information goes straight to the amygdala and the hippocampus. It would be something that one would remember off the bat, along with other high emotions at the time, and Reade has consistently described this incident with conflicting, dissociated detail (until now, of course).That’s “new”, and then there’s the little inference that there’s a potential *new* witness who was there and called out Joe’s name after the assault. Since she’s maintained that there were no witnesses and no one around after the assault, she had to come up with something “new”.Reade is a determined liar who farms resources from other victims in order to use what will best bolster and benefit her story, she’s only now added these little details to her experience. She’s created a fantasy lie for herself, a lie that she needs to live in in order to mentally survive her middling life as a woman who never gained satisfaction from the men in her life. Her father, her beloved brother who passed away on her, her ex-husband who realized his mistake just a little too late to save his relationship with his own daughter, Joe Biden, Frankie Knight (a man she lived with who she didn’t even bother to mention, instead giving the pagespace to ridiculously fictional dark n’ handsome Italians). The females in her life weren’t much better; though she writes of her lovingly, her alcoholic mother was a victim of Reade’s father’s emotional abuse and was, in reality, always clashing with Reade (those pesky court documents again will tell you that), and her 25-year-old daughter is consistently written as a 12-year-old caricature of what a young person’s like, an absurd prop in a narrative where Warrior Mother Tar-icca is portrayed as a steel rail against such horrendous online “attacks” to her impeccable character. Her identity is her victimhood, and this book definitely demonstrates both her ineptitude and her cunning.Maybe Reade would be better off getting a copy of Christy Whitman's TVGuestpert-published “The Art of Having It All: A Woman's Guide to Unlimited Abundance”.Here’s the TLDR;Don’t buy this unless you’re a truly dedicated True Crime fan like I am. You’re better off just reading everything about her online from her own writings.
Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2020
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Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2020
Full disclosure: I’ll be writing from the perspective of someone who has a lot of background on Tara Reade and her decades-long story of a life filled with sorrow, dysfunction, and maladaptive coping/behavior. And if you’re here about this book, you likely came from one of two camps: Rose Twitter (socialists who support Tara Reade) or Trumpanzees (Trump fans who support Tara Reade). It’s an unbelievable convergence of two supposedly polar opposites on the issue of sexual assault, however transparent their own political purposes; but if anyone could prove Horseshoe Theory correct, it’d be the great and mediocre equine enthusiast, Tara Reade.
But before I get to the content, there’s one thing of note (stylistically) off the bat: Reade’s vanity press publisher, “TVGuestpert Publishing” (whose founder Jacquie Jordan was punk’d by Sacha Baron Cohen in ‘09) placed their name on the bottom of every page, with two pages of ads for more of their well-reviewed motivational books that you’ve never heard of in the back of the memoir. TVGuestpert’s quite unabashedly intrusive about what they do, printing this promo schlock on the copyrights page: “Our full-service production company, publishing house, management, and media development firm promises to engage you creatively and honor you and ourselves, as well as the community, in order to bring about fulfillment and abundance both personally and professionally.” It’s a perfect union actually, as neither Reade nor TVGuestpert can help their self-promotion at any cost. For TVGuestpert, however, this would be a losing investment in terms of narrative, structure, and format.
It’s short--a mere 170 pages in the .pdf version released on October 27th--and is a quick read at a fairly consistent fifth grade reading level. The first chapter,“Tara-rized: Scandal in a Pandemic”, will set the tone for the sudden transitions within her embarrassingly Hackneyed & Cringe narrative complete with friendly forest creatures and wild rom-com sequences: her weak attempts at segues make for rough transitions and it gives the reader a feel that everything is completely disjointed and sometimes nonsensical; I found myself asking, “Wait, where did that person pop up from?” or “Wait, I thought she said something else two pages back?” Indeed, on page 154 she states that “In 1999, Ted’s parental rights were terminated in court due to abuse of his daughter,” while on the very next page she writes, “That year was a rollercoaster of events that led to me getting full custody and Ted’s parental rights being terminated in 1998.” It’s almost as if she just sat down and wrote it in a day without spell checking and submitted it to TVGuestpert where they too failed to edit anything apart from placing their ads everywhere.
Allow me to zip through a few incidentals regarding content: Reade and her supporters made a big stink--and big false allegations--on Twitter about her daughter’s Michaela privacy, yet it’s the first name she mentions in the book in the dedication despite the “(some) names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals” disclaimer. Rose McGowan’s foreword is her usual pompous celebrity claptrap that kicks off the libel against our 47th vice president, and Reade’s introduction is, like all other things that came before it in her life, full of lies.
But there is one lie in particular that stood out to me when I read it: it was the claim that her then-ex-husband (their divorce was final in November 1996) raped her on Easter Sunday 1997:
“It was Easter Sunday, and he came to see Michaela and I at our new place. It would be the last time we would interact without legal restrictions. He played with Michaela and her Easter basket briefly, then she went down for a nap. I stood awkwardly wishing that he would just leave, but then he said, “ Let’s go lie down. I need to lay down now.” What happened next I have not spoken about publicly and rarely privately. Does lightning strike twice? In my case, yes.” (pg. 152)
Actually, no. No, it doesn’t.
(This is extraneous to an actual book review, but it’s all important to note, regarding the veracity of her claims within. There are two things that this memoir should be fact checked against, her accusations compared: available court documents from her 1996 divorce & 1997 visitation dispute from her allegedly violent ex-husband Theodore “Ted” Dronen and her essay on The Women’s International Perspective’s website called “ Defying the Rule of Thumb: A Domestic Violence Survivor’s Story” (published February 13, 2009). Both are easily discoverable online, and I discovered them months ago. I've provided a screencap of the relevant page of Reade's 1997 sworn court statement concerning Easter Sunday 1997.)
Ted wrote in his sworn statement to the court that he and Reade had a reconciliation from November 1996 until April 2nd, 1997. Ted also wrote in the same statement that during that reconciliation, Reade would allow him to see Michaela unsupervised several times (even though that wasn’t part of the court’s orders) and that Reade would stalk him, pleading with him some sob story about how she didn’t like how her life was going (Ted had *over*paid his child support payments for at least five months because of a large check from his grandfather, but then told Reade that he wasn’t going to be able to offer that extra money anymore after April). However, once Ted ended the reconciliation on April 2nd, Reade did everything she could to obstruct Ted’s rightfully earned court ordered visitation including going to his probation officer.
This book certainly filled in that blank for me, since it’d been muddied as to what happened on that Easter Sunday according to the court documents. But I feel that potential readers need to know what was said in 1997 about that date and the days that came, according to both Reade and her ex. Because of Reade’s false implications, Ted’s probation officer had issued a warrant for his arrest but then dropped it after conferring with Ted’s counselor. Yes, Reade had contacted *both* Ted’s probation officer and his counselor, and this is what Ted had to say about the latter:
“(Reade) asked him to confirm that I was a member of his group. (Reade) requested that (my counselor) discuss matters regarding my attendance in group therapy, and asked him to agree with her opinion that something must be wrong with me.”
That happened on April 8, 1997, nearly a week after Ted ended their reconciliation. Literally no one was buying what Reade was selling--not even Reade herself, apparently, because this is what she swore to the court on June 11, 1997 about that same day (see accompanying screenshot):
“There was no reconciliation until the weekend of March 30, 1997. Mr. Dronen and I did have
cordial relations and discussions regarding reconciliation over the period of 6 months.”
Then later on she wrote:
“The petitioner ended any possibility of reconciliation with his verbal abuse on March 30th in
front of our daughter and taking her to his residence without my permission and at my protest.”
There was absolutely nothing in the court statement that reflects the current fantasy that’s described in this book; in the book, her ex doesn’t just verbally abuse her and take off with his child. No, the *new* narrative is that quiet Ted was charming and threatening, raping her practically at knifepoint, left her bleeding, and doesn’t take the child. For someone who was desperate to spin the consensuality of their reconciliation and to keep Ted away from his daughter if he wasn’t willing to continue a reconciliation, she couldn’t spin it into rape even to her ex’s probation officer.
And her supporters still wonder why no one believes her stories? Really? Incidentally, the judge ruled in favor of Ted’s unsupervised visitation, and that’s why Reade flipped out and ran off with Michaela, hiding her from him and his family; she makes reference to this in the book, when “one night Ted’s relatives were pounding on [her mother Jeanette’s] door, yelling and asking for Michaela and me” (pg.140). This big new accusation is nothing but another big lie in the neverending chain of lies Reade has told in order to cope with a fractured identity from a broken and dysfunctional household where everyone lies.
I think next to the new accusation of rape, the badly segued passages straight out of Roman Holiday irritated me the most, as it read with a suffered mangling of the beautiful (and unitalicized) Italian language: “Adiamo” & “Adaiamo” (andiamo) “docdici” (dodici) “pourvo bambina” (povera bambina). Further bad editing (“countere”, end quotes as beginning quotes, awkward sentence structure), “Stacey” for “Stephanie’ in identical copypasta from the “Defying the Rule of Thumb” essay just fortifies the fact that this was a hastily, sloppily put together self-publish that deserves nothing but scorn.
But ah, of course, readers wanted to know if there was anything new about the Biden accusation. Of course there was. She’s gone from saying that “There was no like exchange, really,” to podcaster Katie Halper in March 2020 to her having an exchange, saying “Yes, Senator?” (pg. 114). She’s gone from saying “he grabbed me by the shoulders and he said, “ You’re okay, you’re fine, you’re okay, you’re fine.” And then, uhm, he walked away and he went on with his day” to Halper (and to Megyn Kelly in May 2020) to this in the book:
“Then abruptly he said, “Go on now, you’re fine. You are okay.”
Instead, I was frozen in place. He lightly shook my shoulders...I am trying to get my one shoe back on after being on my tiptoes when he was holding me at the wall.
The Senator adjusted his shirt and pants, and strode away with his gym bag. He did not look back. I heard someone shout, “Joe,” but I could not see anyone. He was jovial in his response. And with that, Joe Biden was gone. (pg. 115)
It’s common that trauma victims will remember and add details of their traumatic experience later, but the kind of *strong* trauma details that stick with you throughout--like the “smell of dry cleaning” Reade describes to [the sexist clown of a supporter] Anthony Zenkus on page 28 weren’t present in either long recollection she gave to either Harper or Kelly. Scent is a primary trigger for trauma since there’s little control over what the nose knows (one can’t “shut their nose” quickly enough like one can shut their eyes); the trigger of scent encodes differently and the information goes straight to the amygdala and the hippocampus. It would be something that one would remember off the bat, along with other high emotions at the time, and Reade has consistently described this incident with conflicting, dissociated detail (until now, of course).
That’s “new”, and then there’s the little inference that there’s a potential *new* witness who was there and called out Joe’s name after the assault. Since she’s maintained that there were no witnesses and no one around after the assault, she had to come up with something “new”.
Reade is a determined liar who farms resources from other victims in order to use what will best bolster and benefit her story, she’s only now added these little details to her experience. She’s created a fantasy lie for herself, a lie that she needs to live in in order to mentally survive her middling life as a woman who never gained satisfaction from the men in her life. Her father, her beloved brother who passed away on her, her ex-husband who realized his mistake just a little too late to save his relationship with his own daughter, Joe Biden, Frankie Knight (a man she lived with who she didn’t even bother to mention, instead giving the pagespace to ridiculously fictional dark n’ handsome Italians). The females in her life weren’t much better; though she writes of her lovingly, her alcoholic mother was a victim of Reade’s father’s emotional abuse and was, in reality, always clashing with Reade (those pesky court documents again will tell you that), and her 25-year-old daughter is consistently written as a 12-year-old caricature of what a young person’s like, an absurd prop in a narrative where Warrior Mother Tar-icca is portrayed as a steel rail against such horrendous online “attacks” to her impeccable character. Her identity is her victimhood, and this book definitely demonstrates both her ineptitude and her cunning.
Maybe Reade would be better off getting a copy of Christy Whitman's TVGuestpert-published “The Art of Having It All: A Woman's Guide to Unlimited Abundance”.
Here’s the TLDR;
Don’t buy this unless you’re a truly dedicated True Crime fan like I am. You’re better off just reading everything about her online from her own writings.
Warrior Mother Tar-icca von Munchausen strikes again, and it's just...so...bad.
Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2020
No. Sorry, but no.Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2020
Full disclosure: I’ll be writing from the perspective of someone who has a lot of background on Tara Reade and her decades-long story of a life filled with sorrow, dysfunction, and maladaptive coping/behavior. And if you’re here about this book, you likely came from one of two camps: Rose Twitter (socialists who support Tara Reade) or Trumpanzees (Trump fans who support Tara Reade). It’s an unbelievable convergence of two supposedly polar opposites on the issue of sexual assault, however transparent their own political purposes; but if anyone could prove Horseshoe Theory correct, it’d be the great and mediocre equine enthusiast, Tara Reade.
But before I get to the content, there’s one thing of note (stylistically) off the bat: Reade’s vanity press publisher, “TVGuestpert Publishing” (whose founder Jacquie Jordan was punk’d by Sacha Baron Cohen in ‘09) placed their name on the bottom of every page, with two pages of ads for more of their well-reviewed motivational books that you’ve never heard of in the back of the memoir. TVGuestpert’s quite unabashedly intrusive about what they do, printing this promo schlock on the copyrights page: “Our full-service production company, publishing house, management, and media development firm promises to engage you creatively and honor you and ourselves, as well as the community, in order to bring about fulfillment and abundance both personally and professionally.” It’s a perfect union actually, as neither Reade nor TVGuestpert can help their self-promotion at any cost. For TVGuestpert, however, this would be a losing investment in terms of narrative, structure, and format.
It’s short--a mere 170 pages in the .pdf version released on October 27th--and is a quick read at a fairly consistent fifth grade reading level. The first chapter,“Tara-rized: Scandal in a Pandemic”, will set the tone for the sudden transitions within her embarrassingly Hackneyed & Cringe narrative complete with friendly forest creatures and wild rom-com sequences: her weak attempts at segues make for rough transitions and it gives the reader a feel that everything is completely disjointed and sometimes nonsensical; I found myself asking, “Wait, where did that person pop up from?” or “Wait, I thought she said something else two pages back?” Indeed, on page 154 she states that “In 1999, Ted’s parental rights were terminated in court due to abuse of his daughter,” while on the very next page she writes, “That year was a rollercoaster of events that led to me getting full custody and Ted’s parental rights being terminated in 1998.” It’s almost as if she just sat down and wrote it in a day without spell checking and submitted it to TVGuestpert where they too failed to edit anything apart from placing their ads everywhere.
Allow me to zip through a few incidentals regarding content: Reade and her supporters made a big stink--and big false allegations--on Twitter about her daughter’s Michaela privacy, yet it’s the first name she mentions in the book in the dedication despite the “(some) names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals” disclaimer. Rose McGowan’s foreword is her usual pompous celebrity claptrap that kicks off the libel against our 47th vice president, and Reade’s introduction is, like all other things that came before it in her life, full of lies.
But there is one lie in particular that stood out to me when I read it: it was the claim that her then-ex-husband (their divorce was final in November 1996) raped her on Easter Sunday 1997:
“It was Easter Sunday, and he came to see Michaela and I at our new place. It would be the last time we would interact without legal restrictions. He played with Michaela and her Easter basket briefly, then she went down for a nap. I stood awkwardly wishing that he would just leave, but then he said, “ Let’s go lie down. I need to lay down now.” What happened next I have not spoken about publicly and rarely privately. Does lightning strike twice? In my case, yes.” (pg. 152)
Actually, no. No, it doesn’t.
(This is extraneous to an actual book review, but it’s all important to note, regarding the veracity of her claims within. There are two things that this memoir should be fact checked against, her accusations compared: available court documents from her 1996 divorce & 1997 visitation dispute from her allegedly violent ex-husband Theodore “Ted” Dronen and her essay on The Women’s International Perspective’s website called “ Defying the Rule of Thumb: A Domestic Violence Survivor’s Story” (published February 13, 2009). Both are easily discoverable online, and I discovered them months ago. I've provided a screencap of the relevant page of Reade's 1997 sworn court statement concerning Easter Sunday 1997.)
Ted wrote in his sworn statement to the court that he and Reade had a reconciliation from November 1996 until April 2nd, 1997. Ted also wrote in the same statement that during that reconciliation, Reade would allow him to see Michaela unsupervised several times (even though that wasn’t part of the court’s orders) and that Reade would stalk him, pleading with him some sob story about how she didn’t like how her life was going (Ted had *over*paid his child support payments for at least five months because of a large check from his grandfather, but then told Reade that he wasn’t going to be able to offer that extra money anymore after April). However, once Ted ended the reconciliation on April 2nd, Reade did everything she could to obstruct Ted’s rightfully earned court ordered visitation including going to his probation officer.
This book certainly filled in that blank for me, since it’d been muddied as to what happened on that Easter Sunday according to the court documents. But I feel that potential readers need to know what was said in 1997 about that date and the days that came, according to both Reade and her ex. Because of Reade’s false implications, Ted’s probation officer had issued a warrant for his arrest but then dropped it after conferring with Ted’s counselor. Yes, Reade had contacted *both* Ted’s probation officer and his counselor, and this is what Ted had to say about the latter:
“(Reade) asked him to confirm that I was a member of his group. (Reade) requested that (my counselor) discuss matters regarding my attendance in group therapy, and asked him to agree with her opinion that something must be wrong with me.”
That happened on April 8, 1997, nearly a week after Ted ended their reconciliation. Literally no one was buying what Reade was selling--not even Reade herself, apparently, because this is what she swore to the court on June 11, 1997 about that same day (see accompanying screenshot):
“There was no reconciliation until the weekend of March 30, 1997. Mr. Dronen and I did have
cordial relations and discussions regarding reconciliation over the period of 6 months.”
Then later on she wrote:
“The petitioner ended any possibility of reconciliation with his verbal abuse on March 30th in
front of our daughter and taking her to his residence without my permission and at my protest.”
There was absolutely nothing in the court statement that reflects the current fantasy that’s described in this book; in the book, her ex doesn’t just verbally abuse her and take off with his child. No, the *new* narrative is that quiet Ted was charming and threatening, raping her practically at knifepoint, left her bleeding, and doesn’t take the child. For someone who was desperate to spin the consensuality of their reconciliation and to keep Ted away from his daughter if he wasn’t willing to continue a reconciliation, she couldn’t spin it into rape even to her ex’s probation officer.
And her supporters still wonder why no one believes her stories? Really? Incidentally, the judge ruled in favor of Ted’s unsupervised visitation, and that’s why Reade flipped out and ran off with Michaela, hiding her from him and his family; she makes reference to this in the book, when “one night Ted’s relatives were pounding on [her mother Jeanette’s] door, yelling and asking for Michaela and me” (pg.140). This big new accusation is nothing but another big lie in the neverending chain of lies Reade has told in order to cope with a fractured identity from a broken and dysfunctional household where everyone lies.
I think next to the new accusation of rape, the badly segued passages straight out of Roman Holiday irritated me the most, as it read with a suffered mangling of the beautiful (and unitalicized) Italian language: “Adiamo” & “Adaiamo” (andiamo) “docdici” (dodici) “pourvo bambina” (povera bambina). Further bad editing (“countere”, end quotes as beginning quotes, awkward sentence structure), “Stacey” for “Stephanie’ in identical copypasta from the “Defying the Rule of Thumb” essay just fortifies the fact that this was a hastily, sloppily put together self-publish that deserves nothing but scorn.
But ah, of course, readers wanted to know if there was anything new about the Biden accusation. Of course there was. She’s gone from saying that “There was no like exchange, really,” to podcaster Katie Halper in March 2020 to her having an exchange, saying “Yes, Senator?” (pg. 114). She’s gone from saying “he grabbed me by the shoulders and he said, “ You’re okay, you’re fine, you’re okay, you’re fine.” And then, uhm, he walked away and he went on with his day” to Halper (and to Megyn Kelly in May 2020) to this in the book:
“Then abruptly he said, “Go on now, you’re fine. You are okay.”
Instead, I was frozen in place. He lightly shook my shoulders...I am trying to get my one shoe back on after being on my tiptoes when he was holding me at the wall.
The Senator adjusted his shirt and pants, and strode away with his gym bag. He did not look back. I heard someone shout, “Joe,” but I could not see anyone. He was jovial in his response. And with that, Joe Biden was gone. (pg. 115)
It’s common that trauma victims will remember and add details of their traumatic experience later, but the kind of *strong* trauma details that stick with you throughout--like the “smell of dry cleaning” Reade describes to [the sexist clown of a supporter] Anthony Zenkus on page 28 weren’t present in either long recollection she gave to either Harper or Kelly. Scent is a primary trigger for trauma since there’s little control over what the nose knows (one can’t “shut their nose” quickly enough like one can shut their eyes); the trigger of scent encodes differently and the information goes straight to the amygdala and the hippocampus. It would be something that one would remember off the bat, along with other high emotions at the time, and Reade has consistently described this incident with conflicting, dissociated detail (until now, of course).
That’s “new”, and then there’s the little inference that there’s a potential *new* witness who was there and called out Joe’s name after the assault. Since she’s maintained that there were no witnesses and no one around after the assault, she had to come up with something “new”.
Reade is a determined liar who farms resources from other victims in order to use what will best bolster and benefit her story, she’s only now added these little details to her experience. She’s created a fantasy lie for herself, a lie that she needs to live in in order to mentally survive her middling life as a woman who never gained satisfaction from the men in her life. Her father, her beloved brother who passed away on her, her ex-husband who realized his mistake just a little too late to save his relationship with his own daughter, Joe Biden, Frankie Knight (a man she lived with who she didn’t even bother to mention, instead giving the pagespace to ridiculously fictional dark n’ handsome Italians). The females in her life weren’t much better; though she writes of her lovingly, her alcoholic mother was a victim of Reade’s father’s emotional abuse and was, in reality, always clashing with Reade (those pesky court documents again will tell you that), and her 25-year-old daughter is consistently written as a 12-year-old caricature of what a young person’s like, an absurd prop in a narrative where Warrior Mother Tar-icca is portrayed as a steel rail against such horrendous online “attacks” to her impeccable character. Her identity is her victimhood, and this book definitely demonstrates both her ineptitude and her cunning.
Maybe Reade would be better off getting a copy of Christy Whitman's TVGuestpert-published “The Art of Having It All: A Woman's Guide to Unlimited Abundance”.
Here’s the TLDR;
Don’t buy this unless you’re a truly dedicated True Crime fan like I am. You’re better off just reading everything about her online from her own writings.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2020
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